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On Godly Grounds, a Prideful Flock

By James Barron January 31, 2012 6:46 pmJanuary 31, 2012 6:46 pm

James Estrin/The New York TimesOne of the three peacocks who roam the grounds outside the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine.

On the 13 acres surrounding the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine are a biblical garden, a fountain depicting the struggle between good and evil, and three longtime residents who spend their days wandering where they please: Jim, Phil and Harry.

They are peacocks.

They strut. They preen. Sometimes they fly into the trees on the grounds. “They love to lie on the bishop’s flowers,” said Ray Guyette, the cathedral’s director of facilities management, “especially after we replant them.”

The dean of the cathedral, the Very Rev. James A. Kowalski — for whom Jim was named — said that for many visitors, the cathedral and its grounds are “an exotic gardenlike space that engenders mystical imaginative reaction from people.”

“That’s the way people across cultures and time have responded to peacocks in general,” he said. “The visitors are fascinated. We’re not a zoo where animals are caged. These birds wander the property, sometimes going off the property. They’re not really captive, but everyone knows they belong to the cathedral, and we get a phone call and we go and retrieve them.”

Harry was named for a former dean, the Very Rev. Harry H. Pritchett Jr., and Phil for Phillip Foote, the former head of the Cathedral School — behind which Jim was hiding on Tuesday afternoon.

Unless that was Harry. No one among the buildings-and-grounds types who keep tabs on things at the cathedral, in Morningside Heights, seemed certain.

Peacocks have lived on the cathedral grounds since the 1980s, when the Bronx Zoo donated some chicks. For a while, the menagerie included a peahen. Jim and Harry were purchased and donated about 10 years ago; Jim took the place of another Jim, named for one of Father Kowalski’s predecessors, the Very Rev. James Parks Morton. Phil, a white peacock, came later.

“They don’t like each other,” said Barbara Hohol, the co-chairwoman of the block association on West 112th Street. “They do like dog biscuits.”

Mr. Guyette said the cathedral buys 500 pounds of food every few months — a mixture in which the main ingredient appears to be sunflower seeds.

Ms. Hohol said she discovered that they were dog-biscuit connoisseurs when she was being, um, tailed by a peacock that must have smelled what she had in her pocket, a treat for dogs in the neighborhood. She found herself treating whichever peacock had been in hot pursuit.

“They’re not allowed to have anything with sugar,” she said, “and they probably shouldn’t have the Chinese noodles. It’s my fault.” That led to a story about the time she had won-ton soup and took the noodles to Jim, Phil or Harry.

The word from the cathedral was that they are prognosticators, that when they start showing their plumage, spring cannot be far behind.

They are a reluctant bunch. For an hour on Tuesday, they bobbed here and there. Not once did they flash their feathers. But someone saw Harry on full display last week and snapped a photo with a cellphone. A post on the cathedral’s Facebook page drew more than 150 “likes.” The consensus was that groundhogs like Punxsutawney Phil, whose big day is Thursday, have nothing on the peacocks.

Father Kowalski sounded less certain. He said he wondered if “people project their own ideas about things onto these birds.”

“I think people are going to be horribly depressed when we have a snowstorm of any magnitude,” he said. “It’s not like it couldn’t happen in February or March. Suddenly these predictors of spring could be inaccurate.”

Correction: February 3, 2012The City Room column in some editions on Wednesday, about peacocks that live on the grounds of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, in Morningside Heights, misstated a title of Phillip Foote, after whom one of the peacocks is named. He is a former head of the Cathedral School, which is also on the grounds, not its business manager. (His namesake goes by Phil.)

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